New York 1927, by Alexander Alekhine, 168 pages (Russell Enterprises 2011)

This is unlike any other tournament book ever written. Not only do you have one of the greatest annotators of all time rendering some brilliant analysis, but he melds it with an exceptional agenda, an anti-Capablanca agenda. Alekhine goes beyond elaborate move analysis and offers deep positional insights and psychological observations.

 

London 1922, by Geza Maróczy (Russell Enterprises, 2010)

José Capablanca was the superstar of chess in 1922 and London was his first serious chess in the 15 months since he had won the championship title from Emanuel Lasker. “Capa” was the chessplayer whom even non-players could identify. But the tournament signified not only Capa’s return to the game, it was also something of a revival of international chess after four years of war and four more of recovery. As an added bonus, all fourteen games of the 1921 Capablanca-Lasker title match – with annotations by Capa himself – have been added to this new 21st-century edition.

Vienna 1922, Larry Evans, 144pp. (Russell Enterprises 2011)

Vienna 1922 is remembered as one of the first great tournaments after World War I. All the stars of the day (Alekhine, Bogoljubow, Gruenfeld, Maroczy, Reti, Spielmann, Tarrasch and Tartakover) played except Capablanca and Lasker, but it was Akiba Rubinstein who was to turn in an outstanding success scoring an undefeated 11˝ from 14 to finish a point and half ahead of second place Tartakover and two and a half (!) points ahead of Alekhine.